When the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina statehouse Friday morning, Gov. Nikki Haley spoke solemnly of the nine black churchgoers who were shot to death less than a month ago at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Early on Saturday morning a black activist took matters into her own hands by scaling the flagpole at South Carolina's Capitol in Columbia and taking down the Confederate flag by herself.

The woman, Bree Newsome, 30, was about halfway up the more than 30-foot steel flagpole in front of the Statehouse just after dawn Saturday when State Capitol police told her to come down. Instead, she continued up and removed the flag before returning to the ground.

This week the Durham, North Carolina-based nonprofit MDC released its latest State of the South report highlighting how the American dream of intergenerational upward mobility is more elusive for young people born at the bottom of the income ladder in the South than anywhere else in the country.